Art and Furniture from the MAK Collection
26.05.2010 - 30.01.2011
Stubenring 5,Austrian Museum of Applied Arts / Contemporary Art, 1010 Vienna, Austria
Many aspects of the minimalist aesthetic, which is mainly characterized by a clear and simple, mostly geometric formal language, are already discernible in architect designed furniture of the early 20th century.In recent years, they were increasingly taken up again by contemporary artists, some of whom explicitly reference Minimal Art in their works.
Minimal Art / represented in the exhibition with a wall object by American artist Donald Judd / decisively informed the aesthetic of contemporary art, architecture, and design and also had an influence on areas like music, theater, and dance. Typical of it, aside from its reduced formal language, is the use of industrially produced and standardized materials as well as monochromatically reduced coloration, other characteristics to be named are clear structuring, rhythmic detailing and serial repetition of simple elements.
These characteristics are also discernible in Judd s furniture, which is extensively represented at the MAK and almost ideally demonstrates the reduction to geometric and cubic basic shapes as well as the use of prefabricated materials such as colored sheet aluminum or massive wooden boards.The affinity of art and furniture in the work of Donald Judd one of the most important exponents of Minimal Art, together with Carl Andre, Dan Flavin, Sol LeWitt, and Robert Morris / has often been noted: the artist himself saw the two areas as clearly separated because of their different functions, but admitted that similarities inevitably arise when 'someone who creates artworks also works with furniture and architecture. The various interests in form will be consistent.'As a quasi counterpart of the position held by Judd different pieces of furniture by Josef Hoffmann are shown, whose work is also well represented in the MAK collection. Known to many primarily for his rich ornamentalism, the architect and designer Hoffmann had, in a manifesto style text published 1910 in the magazine 'Das Interieur', advocated 'Simple Furniture' and had in fact created a whole series of furniture abstracted to basic geometric shapes. This, for example, his 'slat style/ ['Brettlstil' furniture whose construction emphasized their being made of simple prefabricated wooden slats was quite in keeping with the design principles that Modernism so vehemently called for: restraint in form and decoration, rigorous functionalism, and a finish that suited the material. The furniture created around 1920 by Dutch architect and designer Gerrit Rietveld also had some elements which later were to become distinctive of Minimal Art objects:Rietveld used machinecut square timber painted in primary colors and boards in usual standard sizes to construct furniture which seemed to consist of a geometric array of lines and colored surfaces only. Significantly, Rietveld s furniture ? including the famous Red and Blue Chair (1917) which had been produced in several variations since 1918 belonged to those modern classics that Judd the Minimalist used to furnish his own living and working rooms.Not only did Minimal Art have aesthetic precursors in the area of furniture design, it also had a strong impact itself on today s designers and interior decorators: making furniture of industrially produced materials in simple geometric shapes, they give expression to functionality reduced to bare essentials. Next to Hubert Matthias Sanktjohanser s Social Cube of variable easy to handle basic elements, the show features a simple box from Jasper Morrison s Crate Series as well as Joao Silva s MAK Table created for the 2009 MAK Design Week.Following the furniture appeal of Minimal Art, many contemporary artists have taken up furniture shapes in their artwork and scaled it to furniture dimensions: Heimo Zobernig and Werner Feiersinger frequently make furniture the starting point of their space consuming sculptures whose analogies with useful objects anchors them in viewers everyday experience while their lack of functionality provides a distinct element of irritation. Equally, Layered Impasse Screen, a folding screen like installation of rhythmized colorful translucent panels by British artist Liam Gillick, serves viewers as a springboard into a changed spatial experience intended to inspire a fundamental reconsideration of how to relate to things an intention that had already played a major role in the works of the Minimalists. After all, it had been Donald Judd s declared goal to overcome the spatial illusionism of painting and sculpture in his works and to create three dimensional objects that did not represent anything, but only were a manifestation of their own presence and object status. While, in this spirit, the Meuble by French artist Guillaume Leblon seems to be something like the missing link between Josef Hoffmann s slat style and Donald Judd s minimal furniture, Judd s work quite specifically made a starting point for Austrian designer Andreas Feldinger: in his homage Remember Donald, Feldinger revamped a common piece of Ikea furniture into a functional sculpture and, in doing so, translated a graphic art work by Judd into three dimensionality.In increasingly recurring to the subject of furniture, artists seem not least to renegotiate, rethink, and expand the useful value of the fine arts / in line with the continually changing tasks that art has in our society. So it seems also legitimate to examine, in this exhibition entitled Minimal, the aesthetic elements that Minimal Art has in common with certain precursors in the field of furniture and with successors in the field of furniture like art even if some of the Minimal Artists of the 1960s fiercely resisted being categorized under the rubric of Minimalism. And even if the minimalist aesthetic normally requires much space to unfold its effect on viewers, this exhibition attempts / informed, at is were, by the idea of Maximal Minimal to assemble relatively many objects in limited space to place the focus on furniture.
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September 2010
